To John Tyler Monticello, May 26, 1810

DEAR SIR,

-- Your friendly letter of the 12th has been duly
received. Although I have laid it down as a law to myself, never to
embarrass the President with my solicitations, and have not till now
broken through it, yet I have made a part of yourletter the subject
of one to him, and have done it with all my heart, and in the full
belief that I serve him and the public in urging that appointment.
We have long enough suffered under the base prostitution of law to
party passions in one judge, and the imbecility of another. In the
hands of one the law is nothing more than an ambiguous text, to be
explained by his sophistry into any meaning which may subserve his
personal malice. Nor can any milk-and-water associate maintain his
own dependance, and by a firm pursuance of what the law really is,
extend its protection to the citizens or the public. I believe you
will do it, and where you cannot induce your colleague to do what is
right, you will be firm enough to hinder him from doing what is
wrong, and by opposing sense to sophistry, leave the juries free to
follow their own judgment.

I have long lamented with you the depreciation of law science.
The opinion seems to be that Blackstone is to us what the Alcoran is
to the Mahometans, that everything which is necessary is in him, and
what is not in him is not necessary. I still lend my counsel and
books to such young students as will fix themselves in the
neighborhood. Coke's institutes and reports are their first, and
Blackstone their last book, after an intermediate course of two or
three years. It is nothing more than an elegant digest of what they
will then have acquired from the real fountains of the law. Now men
are born scholars, lawyers, doctors; in our day this was confined to
poets. You wish to see me again in the legislature, but this is
impossible; my mind is now so dissolved in tranquillity, that it can
never again encounter a contentious assembly; the habits of thinking
and speaking off-hand, after a disuse of five and twenty years, have
given place to the slower process of the pen. I have indeed two
great measures at heart, without which no republic can maintain
itself in strength.

That of general education, to enable every
man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom.

To divide every county into hundreds, of such size that all the
children of each will be within reach of a central school in it.

But
this division looks to many other fundamental provisions. Every
hundred, besides a school, should have a justice of the peace, a
constable and a captain of militia. These officers, or some others
within the hundred, should be a corporation to manage all its
concerns, to take care of its roads, its poor, and its police by
patrols, &c., (as the select men of the Eastern townships.) Every
hundred should elect one or two jurors to serve where requisite, and
all other elections should be made in the hundreds separately, and
the votes of all the hundreds be brought together. Our present
Captaincies might be declared hundreds for the present, with a power
to the courts to alter them occasionally. These little republics
would be the main strength of the great one. We owe to them the
vigor given to our revolution in its commencement in the Eastern
States, and by them the Eastern States were enabled to repeal the
embargo in opposition to the Middle, Southern and Western States, and
their large and lubberly division into counties which can never be
assembled. General orders are given out from a centre to the foreman
of every hundred, as to the sergeants of an army, and the whole
nation is thrown into energetic action, in the same direction in one
instant and as one man, and becomes absolutely irresistible. Could I
once see this I should consider it as the dawn of the salvation of
the republic, and say with old Simeon, "nunc dimittas Domine." But
our children will be as wise as we are, and will establish in the
fulness of time those things not yet ripe for establishment.